VISTAMATIC

I've always had a soft spot for Studio Vista / Dutton Picturebacks: the 'comprehensive pictorial surveys written by experts for laymen' on a wide range of topics: cinema, art, crafts, antiques, architecture, ballet, cars, cybernetics, guns, etc. so I thought I'd share some of my (far from complete) collection. Yeah, it's no problem, really, please don't mention it.

This pictureback covers Andy Warhol (his paintings, films and everything else) and was published in 1971, a great time to review the career of an artist who had been both brilliantly creative and incredibly influential in the sixties, but whose subsequent work was far less daring in comparison for all sorts of reasons, including being shot and nearly dying, then, later, totally dying. 

EMPIRE

 

 

In June 1965, Andy Warhol went to the 41st floor of the Time Life Building in New York, set up an Auricon camera and, over two consecutive nights, filmed the Empire State Building from the window. When projected in slow motion (16 frames per second, as specified by Warhol) the six and a half hours of footage runs for eight hours and five minutes.

An exercise in watching (and feeling) the passage of time, the film is, of course, pretty boring, despite the fact that there is, actually, quite a lot going on. Lights blink, the window mists, the picture blurs, the frame wobbles, stuff like that. 

The whole project embodies one of Warhol's key principles: 'when nothing happens, you have the chance to think about everything' (see my previous post for another embodiment of the maxim). It's a quote that has genuinely been one of my biggest influences in terms of both art and life, so if you ever find me staring blankly into space, I'm not inactive, I'm just thinking about everything.